Dirty Work by Eyal Press (2021) landed in my stack following an interview with the New York Times Book Review editor. Its subtitle—Essential Jobs and the Hidden Toll of Inequality in America—summarizes the content aptly, but doesn’t express how un-put-down-able I found this book. Most of the time, when someone makes that clichéd observation—you know the one—about how arresting the scene of something grisly can be, I inwardly roll my eyes. Here, it’s true. The people whose working lives comprise the heart of this volume tell such compelling and horrifying stories that I couldn’t even stop to take notes. Even though it felt like every page contained details worth noting. From drone operators to prison guards to tech employees, these “dirty workers” deserve readers’ attention.

Tamara Shopsin’s LaserWriter II (2021) appealed to the part of me that admires workplace stories; it channels that Halt and Catch Fire energy of the early days in computers, when games lived on floppy disks, and inkjet printers were new-fangled. “Claire prints a test page from the LaserWriter II. The edges of the paper are bright white. They stipple to a black stripe of text in the center, in a kind of reverse ice cream sandwich.” This is as fancy as it gets and that’s pretty action-packed too. It’s a pocket-sized hard-cover novel, with a lot of half-pages instead of chapters, and a few dot-matrix images scattered throughout. In the end, I enjoyed the idea of it more than the story or the writing—but I just kept reading anyway. Almost on automatic. You know, as if the pages were in an endless zigzag of progression or something.

A successful inventor of a clean energy machine, Benedict in Todd Babiak’s The Spirits Up (2021) is suddenly overwhelmed with new possibilities…unprepared for all of it and oblivious to the drama in his wife and daughters’ lives. Throughout the novel, Christmas music is blaring and the stockings are carelessly strewn around the rotating perspectives. The legislative grounds are fully decorated and the Save-on-Foods lot is filled with evergreens, there’s a collection of tomte Santas and a student holiday concert, RuPaul is singing “Hey Sis, It’s Christmas” and mom watches Emmet Otter’s Jug-Band Christmas with a glass of wine. ‘[Charlotte] liked this sort of blowing everywhere snow when she could look out at it from inside the warm house, ideally with a cup of hot chocolate.” Except the house isn’t warm now. It’s cold, contaminated even, and there’s no easy way to say it, they’re all haunted: the lights of the squad car are flashing “shamefully against the snow.” Who knew this would be such a fantastic holiday story!

Louise Erdrich’s The Sentence (2021) features a ghost, too but, this time, in a bookstore. Other than, perhaps, a library, a bookshop is my ideal setting for a workplace novel. Erdrich, IRL, runs Birchbark Books in Minneapolis; it’s easy to imagine that there’s a lot of overlap between the list of books that Tookie recommends (her favourites are discussed through the narrative but also are gathered conveniently in a long list at the back of the book) and Erdrich’s favourites. I used to recommend Last Report on the Miracles of Little No Horse as my favourite bookish novel by this MustReadEverything author, but now there’s competition. (Not really: they’re different.)

Not a bookseller, but a novelist, is at the heart of Hell of a Book by Jason Mott (2021). “But get me alone and ask me what my book’s about and I’m never able to say. Much like my mother, my book has become nothing more than a ghost inside my head.” The daily toil of touring to promote his work is exhausting, and the longer he inhabits this interstitial space, the more inescapable essential questions about identity seem to be. “Reality as a whole—past or present—just isn’t a good place to hang out, in my opinion. There are better ways and places to spend your time.” There are many astute observations about the strange business of writing fiction—“The modern author is only as important as their search results”—and it’s entertaining and engaging throughout.

Creating a narrative that sells: that’s the profession at the heart of Season of Anomy by Wole Soyinka (1973) too. “We wanted fine fine film in technicolor telling the people what a fine fine crop this cocoa is. Fine fine women dancing to fine fine music. Fine fine happy family round the table in every fine fine home. Already you have made cocoa the sine qua whatever you call it in every family.” But Ofeyi feels like this work is a “prostitution of his talents.” His dialogue is impeccable although the exposition requires readers to slow (and/or reread) to admire the detail: “Impassive and expressionless, permanent slits of boredom and disdain served for a pair of eyes.” More than a dozen years after writing this, Soyinka would win the Nobel Prize. (He’s admired greatly by students in Bisi Adjapon’s debut too.)

A marketing professional is at the heart of Colson Whitehead’s Apex Hides the Hurt (2006) too. “They brainstormed, bullshitted, performed assorted chicanery, and then sometimes they hit one out of the park.” And, here, he specializes in naming: the process of rebranding creates an ideal opportunity to consider how one can reimagine one’s past by adopting a new identity in the present, in order to create new future possibilities. There are some sharply funny bits (“Do you think Charred and Feathered would be a good name for a chicken joint?”). And even though a decade has passed, these ideas and concerns endure: “He couldn’t argue with America. It was one of those balloon names. It kept stretching as it filled up, getting bigger and bigger and thinner and thinner.”

Jung Yun’s O Beautiful (2021) reminded me, at first, of Toni Jensen’s Carry, for being near the Bakken; then, with the more concentrated focus on the oil industry, I thought of David Huebert’s Chemical Valley, a collection of eleven short stories that broke my heart eleven times (and then I had to reread them, to review the collection for Event). The tone is direct and matter-of-fact, which—layered with the themes of vulnerability and disorienation—sustains the Jensen comparison, even while the looming darkness and sense of alienation is all-Huebert-all-the-time. In the end, however, Jung Yun’s style more resembles the detail-packed women’s stories in Christine Smallwood’s The Life of the Mind, the stories of Clare Boyles, and Nell Freudenberger’s The Newlyweds.

Elinor in Jung Yun’s novel is aiming to launch a career as a freelancer writer, and readers observe working-class life in the Bakken via her investigations. Colson Whitehead’s literary career launched with another workplace story, about elevator inspectors (with the ever-present concept of rising and falling social status), The Intuitionist; his novel John Henry Days (2001) reexamines a figure of 19th-century folklore, a railroad worker, in parallel with a contemporary Black man, working as a journalist. If you’re thinking that’s a wide gap to cross, you’re probably new to Colson Whitehead’s fiction; and, if you’re new to his fiction, you’re probably going to opt for The Underground Railroad instead. But this would be a fine place to begin. My first of his novels was Zone One, which also unfolds in the workplace.

Tomorrow, a Nigerian author’s debut novel from 1965, reissued with a colourful new cover to match the author’s 2021 novel about happiness–ahem–any guesses?